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Syntax is more diverse, and evolutionary linguistics is already here

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

William Croft
William Croft
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001. wcroft@unm.eduhttp://www.unm.edu/~wcroft
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Abstract

Evans & Levinson (E&L) perform a major service for cognitive science. The assumption of Chomskyan generative linguistics – that there are absolute unrestricted universals of grammatical structure – is empirically untenable. However, E&L are too reluctant to abandon word classes and grammatical relations in syntax. Also, a cognitive scientist can already draw on a substantial linguistics literature on variationist, evolutionary models of language.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 32 , Issue 5 , October 2009 , pp. 453 - 454
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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